


sledge ride

by aes3plex



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Gen, Sci-Fi AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-20
Updated: 2018-12-20
Packaged: 2021-02-26 04:41:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 446
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21907651
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aes3plex/pseuds/aes3plex
Summary: They go down over the pole in a long shriek of metal and end in a column of smoke.
Kudos: 14
Collections: 12 Days of Carnivale ~ 2018





	sledge ride

**Author's Note:**

> This was written & posted on Tumblr for 12 Days of Carnivale 2018.

They go down over the pole in a long shriek of metal and end in a column of smoke.

It’s madness to try for it, miraculous that Blanky brings her down in one piece. The captain would never have risked it. But the captain is dead, and all systems failing, and out here on the edge of known space, in the great uncharted void between Ross’s Star and the Bering Arm, there are so few choices. Against all odds, a terrestrial radio signal on the scanner. This or die choking, freezing, in the black. Francis makes the call.

They are provisioned for a sixty-cycle drift: air, water, sachet protein, fuel cells. On survival rationing they might make six months or seven. But the atmo planetside is breathable with the right filters, and though the land is barren there are seeds in the hydroponics kit; they have always been a resourceful species. There is always hope.

What there isn’t: enough light to run their panels for more than an hour a day. Enough range on their jury-rigged comms tower to uplink. Enough synthed blood to operate. Enough pills. When the third engine went they lost most of C-deck; what remains of the medbay would barely fill a locker. (One of the junior techs is losing himself: against every protocol to ask what he’s been taking but Francis nearly does anyway. The boy doesn’t look well. But then none of them do.)

And still, always, that signal, out there somewhere moving through the icy fog, faint but unquestionable. Back in early days he’d had Des Voeux run the patterns: sentient, every time. No sign of human wreckage but you never know: there have been ships lost out this way before.

On the sixtieth day they start overland: south, where there should be sunlight, and they might be able to charge a battery (where they might be able to grow something).

On the ninety-seventh day the anti-grav on the sledges fails.

Funny, Francis thinks, how far we come just to walk.

A hundred men and women, more or less, chosen for their skills—their intelligence, their strength—their sheer willingness to discover. Reduced, now, to animal muscle, strapped into poorly fashioned harnesses, laughing to one another at the absurdity of it. He wonders how many of them will live.

Across the barren ground James smiles at him: something unsaid there, one way or another. A tension in his jaw. Francis wonders, not for the first time, if he’s wounded. But he won’t say and Francis won’t ask and they will go on like this until one or the other of them falls down.

“John,” Francis says. “Give the order.”


End file.
